Now we just have to worry about the robot overlords.

March 2, 2018 10:46 PM

Quite possibly, octopi are too stupid to take over the world. According to Slate, there are an awful lot of questionable and questionably presented stories on the intelligence of octopi.

You will all hate me for this, but, in the spirit of balance, I had to share this. (And I figure if I didn't, I would see it tomorrow under someone else's nick.)

posted by Samizdata (61 comments total)

WHATEVER
posted by potrzebie at 10:59 PM on March 2, 2018 [15 favorites]

No, I don't hate you for this, Sami (can I call you Sami?). I myself have always doubted the intelligence of octopi; their eight legs/arms/whatever always seemed to me like the guy who wears a toolbelt with umpteen screwdrivers in it, definitely overcompensating.
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:59 PM on March 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

* Octopodes
posted by Space Coyote at 11:01 PM on March 2, 2018 [16 favorites]

> oneswellfoop:
"No, I don't hate you for this, Sami (can I call you Sami?). I myself have always doubted the intelligence of octopi; their eight legs/arms/whatever always seemed to me like the guy who wears a toolbelt with umpteen screwdrivers in it, definitely overcompensating."

Sami is good. Sam is fine. You should have heard back in the pre-MeFightClub Left4Dead days during voice chat...

Yeah, that was the point of the motor primitives. I like the octopodes as much as the next chappie with a Bachelor's in Medieval Metaphysics from Arkham does (yes, it is hanging on my wall) but I think they just really have marketing and image management specialists our current President could only dream of.
posted by Samizdata at 11:05 PM on March 2, 2018

#slatepitches strikes again
posted by edheil at 11:07 PM on March 2, 2018 [16 favorites]

Seriously though, FAKE NEWS

- definitely NOT a cephalopod of any kind
posted by potrzebie at 11:09 PM on March 2, 2018 [11 favorites]

there's a lot of interesting ideas in here, but this article could not be more suited for Slate.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:10 PM on March 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

> vogon_poet:
"there's a lot of interesting ideas in here, but this article could not be more suited for Slate."

I dunno. I don't Slate. Pretty much all I have about them is that they don't cryptomine your machine. But I saw this cited in an unaffiliated newsletter and remembering all the Blue love for our octopodal friends, thought it needed to be passed on.
posted by Samizdata at 11:18 PM on March 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Plus I have a really bad habit of going "Post on MeFi? Naaaaaaaaah." Then seeing it the next day.
posted by Samizdata at 11:18 PM on March 2, 2018 [9 favorites]

Quite possibly, octopi are too stupid to take over the world.

You idiots, that's what they want you to think.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:33 PM on March 2, 2018 [26 favorites]

I appreciate a thoughtful debunking, but I was a little weirded out by “As soon as I was satisfied that they weren’t intelligent, I RESUMED DEVOURING AS MANY AS I COULD.” No chill.
posted by No-sword at 12:30 AM on March 3, 2018 [38 favorites]

Octopuses are not too stupid to take over the world. We are too stupid to realize they already have. 🐙
posted by Celsius1414 at 1:16 AM on March 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

You see, as the cult of octopus intelligence has taken on adherents, I’ve begun to have my doubts.

We now live the age of the cephalopod hipster.
posted by howfar at 1:31 AM on March 3, 2018 [24 favorites]

We are all the octopus.
posted by No-sword at 1:32 AM on March 3, 2018

Boy, howdy. One little post and all the Cthulhu cultists come out of the woodwork...
posted by Samizdata at 1:37 AM on March 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

One little post and all the Cthulhu cultists come out of the woodwork...

C' ymg' ah cephalopod ph' uh'eogg ng ymg' c' ephaiah'hri!
posted by dowcrag at 2:21 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Plus I have a really bad habit of going "Post on MeFi? Naaaaaaaaah." Then seeing it the next day.

Not really sure why you think that's a bad thing. That someone else has lower standards than you do does not in any way reflect badly on you.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:43 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

> Kirth Gerson:
"Plus I have a really bad habit of going "Post on MeFi? Naaaaaaaaah." Then seeing it the next day.

Not really sure why you think that's a bad thing. That someone else has lower standards than you do does not in any way reflect badly on you."

Yeah, but then I see a lot of neat discussions, and I am "I could have done that. I COULD HAVE DONE THAT!"
posted by Samizdata at 2:49 AM on March 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

On the internet, no one knows you’re a human. I mean octopus. Dog. Human.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:36 AM on March 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

"Octopi," Spectro wheedles, "are docile under surgery. They can survive massive removals of brain tissue. Their unconditioned response to prey is very reliable-show them a crab, WHAM! out wiv the old tentacle, home to poisoning and supper. And, Pointsman, they don't bark." ... "No limit to the things you can teach them."

--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
posted by chavenet at 4:02 AM on March 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

::scribbles down names to include in report back to the cephalopod overlords::

What? Oh, nothing, nothing...
posted by briank at 4:13 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

This seems like shitty science to me. The only concrete examples the writer gives debunking octopus intelligence are that their locomotion doesn’t meet some arbitrary standard of movement sophistication (“infinite”), and that they are more motivated to escape jars instead of chilling out inside them when they have a food incentive. The appeal to 19th century metaphors is weird, the snark about the bio guy starting with cockroaches is weird, the resentful/playful tone of the article is weird. I love animal intelligence pieces and would be super open to a real piece ranking octopi with hyenas and trash pandas or whatever, but this guy does not seem like the fellow kid who wore marine biology t shirts to middle school, you know? This guy doesn’t seem like he cares about bio or animals at all? It seems like what he’s criticizing is the fascination people have for pop science, which, why? “The octopus is too cool, well fuck you octopus, I am the one who is too cool for YOU!”. Bad science, bad article.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 4:34 AM on March 3, 2018 [51 favorites]

* Octopodes
posted by Space Coyote at 11:01 PM on March 2

** Octopoggles
posted by FatherDagon at 5:02 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Just no octopuggles, please.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:16 AM on March 3, 2018

They're not the ones we should be worried about.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:22 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Unless things have changed in the last few years, octopus is all still all wild caught. There isn't a way to farm them because they just don't reproduce well in captivity. So while I can accept - maybe, although disagreeing with in the ideas of intelligence - his initial thesis, promoting them as dinner is shortsighted.
posted by cobaltnine at 5:41 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Yet no one ever calls the bee “the genius of the garden.”

They don't?
posted by clawsoon at 6:26 AM on March 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

On the internet, no one knows you’re a human. I mean octopus. Dog. Human.

Cat.

mwoops
posted by fraula at 6:30 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

You know what, I don’t care. This is still one of the greatest MetaFilter comments ever.
posted by capricorn at 6:38 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Wait, trash pandas?
posted by nickmark at 7:08 AM on March 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

“The octopus is too cool, well fuck you octopus, I am the one who is too cool for YOU!”. Bad science, bad article.

Yeah, that was my take. I saw the title and was all "Ooh, everybody knows I'm an octophile so if I post this it will make me seem Fair and Balanced™️" but then I read it and I was all "Nothing to support your shitty premise, octopus-eater, fuck you."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:18 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

Slate.com: Nothing to support your shitty premise
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:36 AM on March 3, 2018 [6 favorites]

Octopodes general.
posted by adamgreenfield at 7:59 AM on March 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was most impressed, way back, with the social learning thing. But I recall that there's been a lot of difficulty replicating those experiments.

It's always a good thing to be very skeptical of trendy, pop-science sensations and the cephalopod hype is no exception.

That said, I, too, am fascinated by cephalopods and this article is egregiously thin on any actual science that contradicts the hype. It really is the slatepitchiest of slatepitches, with a gratuitous dose of "fuck you, that's why". Let's see if the writer is still smirking when he's torn limb from limb by a kraken.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:11 AM on March 3, 2018 [11 favorites]

The author seems overly fond of octopus as a culinary delight. I wonder if he would eat that Korean delicacy/dare where the plate is full of squirmy freshly-chopped octopus tentacles? Octopodes may not be able to write a decent sonnet, but they are undeniably skillful creatures, and if their skill lies primarily in their ability to escape, as the author suggests, so what? Escapist literature, as Le Guin and Gaiman point out, is unfairly maligned: isn’t escape generally recognized as a good thing?
posted by kozad at 8:14 AM on March 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

The question is how to measure intelligence. When these articles about octopus intelligence started to multiply, I began to pay more attention to my pet snails. I always thought my snails were interesting, just, you know, *slow*. If I put piece of lettuce in their tank, they would crawl under it and then float up and attach to it and feed on it. That shows a pretty good understanding of three dimensional space and planning. So I decided to try to test their intelligence, only how? I made a tetrahedron out of twist ties and dropped it in, and they immediately noticed and crawled to the summit; after examining each leg of the tetrahedron they ignored it. Any ideas? I could devise an underwater maze? I could make them crawl up tiny ladders to their food? It's hard to know what's smart and what's adaptation to one's environment.

I had a cat door and one cat who could only go in, and one cat that could only go out of the cat door. Are cats smart?
posted by acrasis at 8:26 AM on March 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

Also, what the actual fuck is up with this dude sneering that “we live in the age of I Fucking Love Science”? Like for real is this guy on Scott Pruitt’s payroll or what? No, you fucking moron tool, we live in the shadow of global environmental catastrophe, in the age of rampant corporate anti-intellectualism and government agendas to wreck of any kind of public, environmental, biological, or any kind of scientific or fact based information. If David Attenborough and some cool octopuses are getting the general public excited about science and getting them to see ocean life as valuable, that’s such a good thing, how could you possibly want to nitpick “I thought the neurological movement system of an animal with eight legs was going to be more complex than it really is, DIDNT LIVE UP TO THE HYPE, lets eat tako again.” This take comes from the same selfish, cynical, morally vacant mentality as Ted Cruz saying that the Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson, as if that was a bad thing. I can’t recall a single other thinkpiece in the last 5 years about marine biology that wasnt desperate about conservation; what ugly hole did Slate dig this guy out of?

ETA: home from working a night shift and this ANGERY post looks like I need a nap :/ Still though, jeez.
posted by moonlight on vermont at 8:33 AM on March 3, 2018 [25 favorites]

tsk, everyone knows hexapodia is the key insight
posted by adrianhon at 8:36 AM on March 3, 2018

Acrasis, please make an FPP when you finish your snail tesseract
posted by kurumi at 8:56 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

I stopped eating octopus about 10 years ago and feel much better about it.

I switched to Orca. Man those things are dumb, and total assholes to boot.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:05 AM on March 3, 2018 [12 favorites]

The problem in defining and quantifying general intelligence across species is just the same problem we have within homo sapiens, but writ large.

On the one hand, the idea that we can generalize about cognitive complexity and adaptability as "general intelligence" is pretty compelling. At the extremes, the difference is clear.

On the other hand, all attempts we've made to define and measure general intelligence in humans have clearly been myopic, with deep biases manifesting as a preference for ability at certain kinds of tasks over others, with little justification for these choices ... rather, they reflect cultural values. Likewise, the tests we use to evaluate non-human intelligence are obviously anthropocentric.

I personally don't believe that the notion of general intelligence is entirely useless and meaningless. Both observationally, and in imagination, at the extremes it seems obvious. It's just that we need to be very careful to remember that the notion of an abstracted general cognitive capability based upon some combination of factors is almost certainly synthetic and likely only will ever be useful for order-of-magnitude comparisons. Outside of those back of the envelope estimates, we're left with domain-specific cognitive abilities, where comparison across domains is a category error.

This is emphatically the case with attempts to compare between species. If we are using functional tests for comparison, then the results are only meaningful with regard to those functions and should never be thought of as a proxy for general intelligence.

Furthermore, this is also true, though perhaps not as profoundly, when we test the "intelligence" of various human subjects. These tests tell us something about relative competence at specific tasks and are not a measure of "general intelligence".

With regard to cross-species comparison, it's undeniable that domain-specific cognitive differences are biologically determined -- it makes little sense to generalize on the basis of task performance. With regard to humans, you can take your pick: there are biologically determined cognitive differences across individuals and tasks, or these differences are culturally determined. Or both. Regardless, we have abundant evidence and much reason to believe that task-specific competence is a very poor measure of this elusive "general intelligence".
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:11 AM on March 3, 2018 [8 favorites]

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphinsoctopi because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphinsoctopuses had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphinsoctopodes had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
posted by ckape at 9:42 AM on March 3, 2018 [5 favorites]

I have this same argument with my wife all the time when we’re eating out and she insists on ordering octopus. Do I think octopuses are sentient? No idea. But we are blessed to have lots of food available to us and I think “don’t eat things that do complicated stuff that I can do” is a safe and easy food choice to make.

If I was starving, and octopus was the only food source, you bet I’d eat one. But I would also eat person under the same circumstances.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:56 AM on March 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

I already knew before clicking that this is a Slate contrarian take. I'm not sure if they achieve much through this kind of editorial choice, but their style is so distinctive that it can be recognized instantly.
posted by krinklyfig at 10:02 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

So we're going to trust Slate in determining intelligence now? How very ironic.
posted by Splunge at 10:37 AM on March 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

It is weird to talk about jar-opening as a measure of intelligence. Octopus don't HAVE jars. Everyone knows they're raw-foodists.

Talking about scenting the rim of the jar is equally preposterous, because it focuses on detail at the expense of the context which is that octopus DON'T HAVE JARS so they DON'T NEED TO KNOW HOW TO OPEN THEM.

What if you measured human intelligence by our ability to open jars? Octopus would draw some pretty unflattering conclusions there, if you ask me.
posted by tel3path at 10:46 AM on March 3, 2018 [9 favorites]

They only constitute a danger when one attempts to milk them.
posted by Chitownfats at 11:34 AM on March 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

So he's using degrees of freedom in the limbs as a standard of intelligence? Well, if Octopi have, three virtual elbows in each arm with six degrees of freedom each (updown sideside twist) then they have (8x9) compared to the human (4x7). So they're only 2.5 times as dexterous as us rather than infinitely more dexterous than us.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:44 AM on March 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

The anger people are feeling is why this is a perfect article for Slate. It's a contrarian backlash to a phenomenon that only exists among overeducated extremely-online urbanites, which is their bread and butter. If you only talk to Slate writers and the people they tweet at, you'd definitely get the sense that "we live in the age of I Fucking Love Science".

It is a really cool article in many ways, but because it's Slate it has to come in the form of an allergic reaction to a niche cultural signifier.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:51 AM on March 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Just no octopuggles, please.
posted by GenjiandProust

We are... too late.
posted by Splunge at 11:51 AM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

And on that note, random Tumblr post (v cute).
posted by disso at 12:05 PM on March 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

Octopi? Octopodes??? Wow, I guess Metafilter is descriptivist in theory, but really is prescriptivist in practice. Clearly it should be Octopusses, ask any first-grader.

What a bunch of pendants.
posted by Arandia at 1:32 PM on March 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

Not going to read the article. Don't want to learn anything new on the subject as I am very happy with my current beliefs—I just love these guys!

(Hey, this attitude seems to be serving the powers that be, so...)
posted by she's not there at 3:47 PM on March 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

TL;DR: Octopuses are complicated and so is cognition.
posted by runcibleshaw at 7:28 PM on March 3, 2018

The question is how to measure intelligence. When these articles about octopus intelligence started to multiply, I began to pay more attention to my pet snails. I always thought my snails were interesting, just, you know, *slow*. If I put piece of lettuce in their tank, they would crawl under it and then float up and attach to it and feed on it. That shows a pretty good understanding of three dimensional space and planning. So I decided to try to test their intelligence, only how? I made a tetrahedron out of twist ties and dropped it in, and they immediately noticed and crawled to the summit; after examining each leg of the tetrahedron they ignored it. Any ideas? I could devise an underwater maze? I could make them crawl up tiny ladders to their food? It's hard to know what's smart and what's adaptation to one's environment.

Since you've already done some wire work, it would be cool to try a snail/vegetarian version of the portia spider experiments, described in the New Scientist and by Peter Watts and discussed here previously.
posted by chortly at 9:15 PM on March 3, 2018

The Inky that arrived in 2014 had passed away some time earlier, and a second octopus named Inky had been put into its tank just a few weeks before the alleged escape. Yarrall claimed it was Inky 2, not Inky 1, who’d crawled and climbed his way to freedom. But according to the program’s nameless source, even this could not be true: Inky 2 had also died, and the tank in question had been given over to an eel.

WHO IS KILLING THE INKYS
is it this eel character
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:54 PM on March 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wait, trash pandas?

There are attempts to rebrand them as "racoons".
posted by MikeKD at 1:18 AM on March 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was bopping along being quite pleased at this state of conversation, people were using different plurals of "octopus" and nobody was rolling out the arguments.

Let's all make like pendants and hang loose, 'kay.
posted by away for regrooving at 2:43 AM on March 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

How dare you.
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 2:45 PM on March 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Slate has never been exactly a go-to for science writing (or really much of anything else but knee-jerk contrarianism). This article does not break the mold.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:03 PM on March 5, 2018

WHO IS KILLING THE INKYS

Pac-Man, or possibly Mrs. Pac-Man.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 2:45 PM on March 5, 2018 [2 favorites]